Fertility in a bag! Prosperity that could be bought in a store! Guano mania took hold. In 40 years, Peru exported about 13 million tons of it, the great majority dug under ghastly working conditions by slaves from China. Seize the guano islands! Spurred by public fury, the U. Congress passed the Guano Islands Act in , authorizing Americans to seize any guano deposits they discovered. Over the next half-century, U. Guano set the template for modern agriculture. Ever since von Liebig, farmers have treated the land as a medium into which they dump bags of chemical nutrients brought in from far away so they can harvest high volumes for shipment to distant markets.
To maximize crop yields, farmers plant ever-larger fields with a single crop—industrial monoculture, as it is called. Before the potato and corn , before intensive fertilization, European living standards were roughly equivalent to those in Cameroon and Bangladesh today. On average, European peasants ate less per day than hunting-and-gathering societies in Africa or the Amazon.
Industrial monoculture allowed billions of people—in Europe first, and then in much of the rest of the world—to escape poverty. The revolution begun by potatoes, corn and guano has allowed living standards to double or triple worldwide even as human numbers climbed from fewer than one billion in to some seven billion today.
It sends out tiny bags of 6 to 12 spores that are carried on the wind, usually for no more than 20 feet, occasionally for half a mile or more. When the bag lands on a susceptible plant, it breaks open, releasing what are technically known as zoospores. If the day is warm and wet enough, the zoospores germinate, sending threadlike filaments into the leaf.
The first obvious symptoms—purple-black or purple-brown spots on the leaves—are visible in about five days. By then it is often too late for the plant to survive. Scientists believe that it originated in Peru. Large-scale traffic between Peru and northern Europe began with the guano rush. Proof will never be found, but it is widely believed that the guano ships carried P. Probably taken to Antwerp, P. The blight hopscotched to Paris by that August. Weeks later, it was destroying potatoes in the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark and England.
Governments panicked. It was reported in Ireland on September 13, Cormac O Grada, an economist and blight historian at University College, Dublin, has estimated that Irish farmers planted about 2. In two months P. The next year was worse, as was the year after that. The attack did not wind down until A million or more Irish people died—one of the deadliest famines in history, in the percentage of population lost. A similar famine in the United States today would kill almost 40 million people.
Within a decade, two million more had fled Ireland, almost three-quarters of them to the United States. Many more would follow. Today the nation has the melancholy distinction of being the only country in Europe, and perhaps the world, to have fewer people within the same boundaries than it did more than years ago.
Despite its ghastly outcome, P. Its name notwithstanding, this orange-and-black creature is not from Colorado. Nor did it have much interest in potatoes in its original habitat, in south-central Mexico; its diet centered on buffalo bur, a weedy, spiny, knee-high potato relative.
Biologists believe that buffalo bur was confined to Mexico until Spaniards, agents of the Columbian Exchange, carried horses and cows to the Americas. Quickly realizing the usefulness of these animals, Indians stole as many as they could, sending them north for their families to ride and eat. Buffalo bur apparently came along, tangled in horse manes, cow tails and native saddlebags.
The beetle followed. In the early s it encountered the cultivated potato around the Missouri River and liked what it tasted. For millennia the potato beetle had made do with the buffalo bur scattered through the Mexican hills. A good place to understand its origins is the Centro Internacional de la Papa CIP , or International Potato Center, a research-for-development centre that researches and promotes all things potato-related. He explained that potatoes were domesticated high in the Andes, near Lake Titicaca, nearly 1,km south-east of Lima.
In , the Spanish invasion brought an end to the Inca but not to the cultivation of potatoes. The invaders took tubers the underground parts of the plant we call potatoes across the Atlantic, as they did with other crops such as tomatoes, avocados and corn, in what historians call the Great Columbian Exchange. For the first time in history, the potato ventured beyond the Americas.
These early Andean varieties had a tough time adjusting to Spain and other parts of mainland Europe. Day length is very constant across the year in the equatorial region where potatoes first were domesticated, so the potato plant was used to regular days with 12 hours of sunlight, said evolutionary geneticist Hernan A Burbano Roa.
The International Potato Center created a map to show the global movement of the potato from its origin in the Andes Credit: International Potato Center. The first decades of planting in the Old Continent proved unsuccessful.
But then potatoes found better conditions in Ireland, where a cool but frost-free fall gave the crop enough time to mature after its introduction from Spain in the s.
A century of farmer selection produced a variety that set tubers earlier in the summer, and the potato took the mantle it would carry for centuries: the staple crop of peasants. Villagers prized potatoes because they provided an unmatched nutritional yield per hectare.
In Ireland in particular, tenants rented the land they tilled, so as lords increased their fees, they were forced to produce as much food as possible in the smallest possible area. Potatoes contain nearly every important vitamin and nutrient, except vitamins A and D, making their life-supporting properties unrivalled by any other single crop.
Keep their skin and add some dairy, which provides the two missing vitamins, and you have a healthy human diet staple. You even have 2g of protein for every g of potato; eat 5.
For landless tenants in 17th- and 18th-Century Ireland, a single acre of land cultivated with potatoes and one milk cow was nutritionally sufficient for feeding a large family of six to eight.
No cereal could claim that feat. Thus, began the centuries-long captivation among Irish and British peasants with the potato, grounded in rented earth and scarcity. From the British Isles, potatoes spread eastwards across peasant fields in Northern Europe, writes Lang: they were found in the Low Countries by , in Germany, Prussia and Poland by and in Russia by s.
Civilisations expanded around the Lake Titicaca area mainly fuelled by the successful growth and harvesting of maize and potatoes. The Huari civilisation emerged in about AD which eventually developed into the state of Tiahuanacu which, among its neighbouring settlements, accounted for a population of around ,!
The Inca civilisation grew in the Cuzco valley in a fter the demise of Huari and Tiahuanacu over the years to This became the largest and fastest growing settlements in the Americas. They improved upon the agricultural approaches of their ancestors and boosted maize and potato production further. From that point on, potato slowly started its journey across the continent, but it received great attention in the s when first Spanish conquistadors started exploring beyond the coasts of South America, especially after s when they searched for gold in Peru.
Among their numerous discoveries, potato received a very notable attention, and they brought that plant to Europe between the years of and Canary Islands received it in European adoption of potato was slow but steady.
In the beginning, Spanish government used potato as a reliable and easily transported food for their military and navy who while using them did not succumb to the scurvy. Sadly, local population of those countries looked at potato as absolutely unneeded, weird, poisonous only roots of the plant were edible, which was totally unheard off in Europe , and in some cases as downright evil.
For many years, potato was accused for causing leprosy, syphilis, early death, sterility, rampant sexuality, scrofula, narcosis and for destroying the soil where it grew.
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